Meet the Members of the Peace Corps Community Recognized with the 2022 JFK Service Award
Every five years, Peace Corps presents the John F. Kennedy Service Awards to honor members of the Peace Corps network whose contributions go above and beyond for the agency and America every day. Here are the 2022 Awardees. By NPCA Staff Photo: Dr. Mamadou Diaw, Peace Corps staff recipient of the 2022 JFK Service Award. Photos Courtesy of the Peace Corps On May 19, at a ceremony at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., the Peace Corps presented The John F. Kennedy Service Awards for 2022. Every five years, the Peace Corps presents the JFK Service Award to recognize members...
New Documentary: Peace Corps Response to COVID
On December 2 the agency premiered a film chronicling the work by Peace Corps Response Volunteers in 2021 to help fight COVID-19 in the United States. By NPCA Staff In 2021, for the second time in the agency’s 60-year history, Peace Corps Response Volunteers deployed in the U.S., at the request of FEMA, to support vaccination efforts. We shared stories from some of those Volunteers in the Summer 2021 edition of WorldView. On December 2, the Peace Corps premiered a documentary, “Peace Corps Response to COVID,” following Volunteers through their three-month journey as they used skills honed during their Peace Corps...
Vishakha Wavde: “This journey has brought me to consider what more I can do.”
Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi (2018–20) | Peace Corps Response Volunteer with FEMA in United States (2021) As told to Emi Krishnamurthy Photo: Vishakha Wavde has worked in community outreach efforts with FEMA in the U.S. Photo by Eli Wittum I have been in the health sector my whole life. I’ve been a physical therapist in Chicago since emigrating to the U.S. from India 27 years ago. In 2020, after being evacuated from Malawi, where I served as a community health advisor, I continued as a physical therapist until I found the opportunity to work with FEMA and the...
Judith Jones: “Literacy will improve countries, economies, and social situations.”
Judith Jones Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Belize (2018–20) | Peace Corps Response Volunteer with FEMA in Oregon, United States (2021) As told to Sarah Steindl Photo: Teacher and student at work in Belize. Photo courtesy Judith Jones My Peace Corps journey was a little bit different. I originally applied to be a two-year Volunteer in Jamaica, and I got rejected for medical reasons. I appealed, and I lost that decision. I was devastated because this was something that I really wanted to do in my retirement. Then out of the blue, a month later, a friend who works for...
Peace Corps Response: An anniversary. A pandemic. A historic moment for this program launched a quarter century ago.
Short-term, high-impact. Now marking 25 years since its founding. By Steven Boyd Saum Photo by Christian Farnsworth A quarter century ago, at a midsummer White House Rose Garden ceremony attended by President Bill Clinton and Sargent Shriver, first director of the Peace Corps, a new type of Peace Corps service was announced to the world: Crisis Corps. Short-term, high-impact, it was, as then-Peace Corps Director Mark Gearan explained, “an effort to harness the enormous experience, skills, motivation, and talents that the Peace Corps, including its returned Volunteer ranks, possesses, and bring them to bear in an organized fashion during...
From the Editor: Crisis and Response
Beginnings. Good sense. And the second time in history that Peace Corps Volunteers have been deployed in the United States. By Steven Boyd Saum Photo from 1994: A Rwandan refugee camp in eastern Zaire. Photo courtesy CDC Here’s an instructive but heart-wrenching place to start, if we want to tell the big story at the center of this edition of WorldView. It’s one of crisis and response: April 1994. A plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi is shot down over Kigali. The assassination ignites events that lead to horrific genocide in Rwanda. Over 100 days, 800,000 people are killed....
Teresa Bonner: “Now you know what it’s like to have a sniper.”
Teresa Bonner Peace Corps Volunteer in Lithuania (1996–98) | Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2001) As told to Ellery Pollard Photo: Mostar, years after the war. Teresa Bonner arrived there to serve as a Crisis Corps Volunteer in September 2001. When I became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lithuania, I expected to go help people. I had a background in design and marketing, and the country was transforming after the breakup of the Soviet Union. But the strongest lessons I came back with were understanding another culture — and that people are the same everywhere in the world:...
Marcy Pursell: Last year, all Volunteers were evacuated. I’ve been there, twice.
Marcy Pursell Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali (2011–12) | Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Mali (2015) and Sierra Leone (2016) As told to Emi Krishnamurthy Photo: “Saying goodbye again is not the easiest thing in the world,” writes Marcy Pursell. “The man on the left, Hassan, was born on the night of my arrival. The man on the right, Bashiro, is my amazing neighbor, Hassan's father and my host father.” Photo by Marcy Pursell After graduating college in 2011, I went to Bambougou, Mali, for a two-year Peace Corps service as an education and literacy specialist. Around...
Priscilla Goldfarb: Within 48 hours she was on a plane, headed to serve in Katrina relief efforts.
Priscilla Goldfarb Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda (1965–67) | Crisis Corps Volunteer in Alabama, United States (2005) By Joshua Berman From the Winter 2010 edition of WorldView Photo: Priscilla Goldfarb serving as a Crisis Corps Volunteer with FEMA after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Courtesy Priscilla Goldfarb Priscilla Goldfarb, a longtime nonprofit executive and former National Peace Corps Association board member, had a 40-year gap between her Peace Corps service in Uganda in the mid-1960s and her first Response assignment. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc across the Gulf Coast — and not long after she retired — Goldfarb received...
Lily Asrat: One of those moments I thought, “We’re doing something right.”
Lily Asrat Peace Corps Volunteer in Namibia (1996–98) | Crisis Corps Volunteer in Guinea (2000) | Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Eastern Caribbean–St. Lucia (2006) As told to Ellery Pollard Photo: Reviewing HIV records in St. Lucia: Lily Asrat working at the National AIDS Program Secretariat. Courtesy Lily Asrat I’m Ethiopian American, and my parents exposed me to a lot of travel early on; they essentially raised me to be a global citizen. I understood that there’s so much out there in the world, and that there isn’t just one way of being. I saw Peace Corps as a...